Heather MacDonald:
...The State of Texas where Republicans hold every statewide office opened its doors and its hearts to victims of Katrina many ovf whom are happy to be off the Democrat plantation and have no desire to return.News outlets and pundits the world over—from the Washington Post to Al Jazeera—have gleefully portrayed the Katrina suffering as the product of what Braun calls “America’s original sin—racism.” Yet for racial sinners, Americans are sure behaving strangely. As of September 11, they had donated at least $788 million to Katrina charities, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy—an unprecedented pace of giving, easily topping the post-9/11 and tsunami giving. “It’s overwhelming,” Sarah Marchetti, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross, told the Chronicle. “People are just pouring their hearts out, and making a donation is an expression of that.” The gifts are coming in from every part of the country, from corporations, radio stations, foundations, churches, blogs, and hospitals.
While the race-mongers try to stoke blacks’ suspicion of whites, the public is showing that it regards all Americans, whatever their color or economic situation, as brothers and sisters. That people are giving so feverishly in spite of the competing images of looting by the flood victims and the reports of murder and rape is even stronger proof that racism has lost its grip on the American mind: the givers are refusing the bigot’s reaction of impugning an entire race by the loathsome behavior of a few.
The unstoppable charity towards New Orleans’s largely black survivors is so massive that even the racial demagogues cannot completely ignore it. Braun acknowledges that “the heart of the people has been touched by this tragedy in ways unknown a century ago.” So Braun is forced into an untenable distinction: the government is racist, but the people are not. This is quite a turnaround for the political and cultural elites. They have always looked to the government to protect blacks from the redneck American public’s racism—through the imposition of racial quotas in hiring, contracting, and college admissions, among other endeavors. Now it turns out that the public doesn’t need all that mandated affirmative discrimination: they see blacks as fellow human beings, not as some inferior “Other.”
Braun’s tortured distinction between a prejudiced government and a charitable people is, of course, absurd: if the public is color-blind in its compassion, its elected representatives will be, too. She offers no theory for why public officials would have held onto race prejudice while the public discarded it.
The racial victocrats and left-wing agitators won’t change their behavior after the Katrina charity outpouring, but opponents of “benign” racial discrimination will have new weapons against it. When the New York Times and other mouthpieces of the elite media blame racism for segregated housing patterns, one might ask why so many allegedly bigoted Americans volunteered to take welfare mothers and their children into their homes. When the allegedly evil Wal-Mart is accused of exploiting the working class, one might ask why it opened up its warehouses and unleashed its manpower as no other corporation has done to help the homeless. When the lack of black proportional representation in technical professions is chalked up to a cartel of discriminating employers, one might query where all those black-rejecting bigots were hiding, as businesses across the country showered job offers on the black poor. And as the Bush-hating Democrats and other political opportunists call for new government welfare programs to assist the victims of American color hatred, just savor their shameless hypocrisy in simultaneously bashing the government for its racism and calling on its sovereign power to force “racial justice” on the public.
See also Jeff Jacoby's Colorblind Relief:
The slimy and toxic water covering much of New Orleans does not stink nearly as much as the slimy and toxic accusation that help didn't reach the victims of Hurricane Katrina quickly enough because most of those victims were black.Read it all.
It is a sickening slander, especially since there is no evidence to back it up. Worse than sickening: It is hateful. It is a libel spread not in a spirit of constructive criticism, but to inflame racial bitterness -- bitterness toward American society generally and toward the Bush administration in particular. Already, a new poll by the Pew Research Center finds that two-thirds of black Americans think the government would have responded faster if most of the victims had been white.
Why wouldn't they think it? For nearly two weeks that false charge has been leveled over and over, sometimes with breathtaking malice and irresponsibility....
This America-as-lethally-racist theme is as factually dishonest as it is morally grotesque. No one denies that most of those stranded in New Orleans were black, but that is because two-thirds of the city's residents -- 326,000 out of a population of 485,000 -- were black. By the same token, most of those who got out before the disaster struck were also black.
Katrina devastated more than black-majority Orleans Parish. Four other Louisiana parishes and three coastal Mississippi counties, all with substantial white majorities, suffered heavily too. Government relief reached them no faster than it did New Orleans. If this were truly a racist country, it would have.
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